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 It’s midmorning in Morrinho. Three figures peer down from a concrete rooftop at the favela’s entrance; one babbles into a walky-talky; either side stand men with rifles strung across their chests, all three wearing flip-flops. None is older than 20.
Morrinho, a sprawling complex of 15 favelas in Rio’s south zone, has been at war since 1998. Soldiers armed with AK-47s and AR-15s stalk its alleys; lookouts scan the urban landscape, waiting for the next invasion.
A police Special Forces truck rattles past on the motorway – BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Especiais – Special Operation Batallion), its feared and detested initial, painted onto the side alongside the image of a skull.
“You get it all here,” says filmmaker, Fábio Gavião who has worked in Morrinho since 2001. “Corruption, police violence. There was even an evangelical pastor killed here recently - he talked too much.”
Morrinho is typical of many Rio favelas. Split between three warring drug factions, its streets are a Far West in the south of Rio. At the entrance to one community, local graffiti artists capture the mood with a single phrase: “Colombia style.”
But Morrinho is no ordinary slum. For a start the houses around here are smaller than most. A three-story shack, for example, measures no more than 10 inches. The average Morrinho dweller is little over three centimetres tall, and made of plastic.
Morrinho (literally ‘little hill’ or ‘favela’) is Rio’s answer to Lego Land. The miniature city was founded in 1998 by a group of local boys and is located in Pereirão, a favela perched high above the upper class Laranjeiras neighbourhood.
“Before there was pretty much nothing to do around here,” remembers Paulo Vitor, 17, one of Morrinho’s founders. “So a few of the guys came up with the idea of turning the land here into somewhere we could play.”
The miniature city, made from a mixture of bricks and Lego, sprung up on what was once a rubbish dump, used by some of Pereirão’s 3,000 residents. It began as just one favela - Cidade de Deus, or City of God, the Rio slum made famous by Fernando Mereilles’ blockbuster film.
Like the real life Cidade de Deus, whose population continues to be bolstered by immigrants from the northeast, Morrinho quickly grew.
Swiping bricks from construction sites and recycling rubbish, the boys added a further 14 communities to the Morrinho complex.
A donation was even made by Pereirão’s then drug lord, who was apparently impressed by the kids work.
Fame only came to Morrinho in 2001 when a local social worker took filmmaker Fábio Gavião on a tour of the area. Gavião put together a documentary and word quickly spread.
As the favelinha’s reputation grew, visitors started to roll up in Pereirão from as far a field as Venezuela and Italy.
In 2003 Morrinho’s juvenile governors were invited to exhibit their work in a nearby museum – Santa Teresa’s Parque das Ruínas.
Rapper Gabriel, O Pensador and singer Fernanda Abreu have even recorded clips amongst Morrinho’s brick patchwork.
To its creators Morrinho’s is far from being a film set. In fact the muddy slopes are the setting for an ongoing role-playing game (RPG) in which Rio’s notorious drug wars are acted out on a daily basis.
Each participant controls a different favela, and is responsible for that community’s drug trade. It is a kind of South American Monopoly in which the players are cocaine barons not estate agents.
“For four rocks of weed you pay 100 reais,” explains Paulo Vitor, who administers the Formiga favela – in reality one of Rio’s most notorious. “And Coke is 100 reais for three rocks,” he adds, picking up a handful of chalk, used to represent cocaine in the Morrinho.
In the fantasy world of Morrinho it’s not a question of not passing ‘Go’ and failing to pick up your $200, but a question of life or death.
“It’s so real that you’ll even find couples getting it on in the motel,” says Gavião.
“When I asked the kids if the models used condoms, they laughed. ‘They’re already made of plastic,’ they said.”
Morrinho is so true-to-life in fact that the police tried to destroy it – mistaking it for a war plan.
“The police told us to take it down,” explains Paulo Vitor. “They thought it was a model being used by the traffickers to plan invasions of other morros (slums).
Fortunately some of them liked it and came here taking photographs. They convinced the others that it was just kids’ stuff.”
Kids stuff it may be, but Morrinho paints a brutal, and very real, portrait of twenty-first century Rio de Janeiro.
“A few weeks before the Tim Lopes murder one of the kids acted out a virtually identical scene here,” remembers Gavião.
In 2002, Lopes was executed in horrific fashion after traffickers caught him filming undercover at a baile funk (funk music ball) in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão.
Having been quartered with a samurai sword, his body was burnt in a so-called micro-onda (microwave) – a makeshift crematorium of car tyres often used to dispose of enemies.
As Gavião puts it: “There are no superheroes here. Here they only represent reality.”
Paradoxically, given the make-believe violence acted out here, Pereirão is one of Rio’s calmest favelas. Its last dono (drug lord), known as ‘Portuguese’, was killed during a police invasion five years ago.
Since then, Pereirão has transformed from a community controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug faction to what Cariocas (Rio residents) refer to as a ‘Comando Azul’ (Blue Command) one - in which police and not traffickers rule the roost.
“Pereirão is tranquillity incarnate. Total Peace,” says Gavião, in between phone calls preparing for the following day’s baile funk, organized on a concrete court at the foot of the community.
“Back in 1998 it was barra pesada (heavy shit), absolute war,” explains Paulo Vitor, whose grandparents arrived in the community over 50 years ago. “But this is all part of the past.”
“Every now and again the police come in here on training exercises, all dressed up in green and with helmets on, but it’s pretty peaceful.”
The sound of car engines below is barely audible and only the occasional plane coming into land at the Santos Dumont airport breaks the silence.
Unlike in the surrounding favelas of Fogueteira, Querosene and Prazeres, it is blood hungry mosquitoes - not drug traffickers - that pose the greatest threat in Pereirão.
Yet Pereirão suffers from other problems common to the poorer parts of Brazilian society.
Though an incongruous block of new houses built by the government’s Favela-Bairro project crown the favela, unemployment here remains as high as schooling levels are low.
The only politician Paulo remembers seeing in the community is Benedita da Silva, a favela resident turned governor of Rio, who was for a time in President Lula’s cabinet, before engulfing herself in a scandal involving use of public money.
“But she doesn’t count,” he explains from the top of the hill, beneath which Rio’s spectacular landscape spreads out before the eye. “She’s got some family who live down at the bottom.”
Life like in almost every other way, Morrinho’s local government is apparently not much cop either.
“More or less,” sighs Paulo, when asked how impressed he is by Morrinho’s make-believe prefeitura (City Hall).
Behind him at the entrance to Morrinho a quote from Bob Marley, has been scrawled onto a plaque, welcoming visitors to the embattled community. “My music is in favour of justice and against the set of rules that day a man’s colour should decide his fate.”
Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the Independent and the Sunday Herald and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You can contact him on: atphillips@gmail.com
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